About Doug Smith

Doug leads research and development into decadal climate prediction.

Areas of expertise

• seasonal to decadal climate prediction and variability;

• assimilation of observations for the initialisation of climate models;

• analysis of sub-surface ocean observations;

• ocean-atmosphere interactions;

• assessment of forecast skill, including extremes of temperature and precipitation, and Atlantic hurricanes.

Publications by Doug 

Current activities

Decadal prediction is a relatively new area of climate science, aiming to provide guidance for adaptation and mitigation strategies for the coming years to a couple of decades. On these timescales, both natural variability and anthropogenically forced changes must be taken into account. This is achieved using the Met Office Decadal Climate Prediction System DePreSys. By starting from the observed state of the atmosphere and ocean DePreSys has the potential to predict natural internal variability in addition to the forced response to plausible changes in anthropogenic sources of greenhouse gases and aerosol concentrations, and projected changes in solar irradiance and volcanic aerosol. Experimental decadal forecasts, and verification of previous forecasts, are available here:

Long-range predictions

The IPCC will include a focus on decadal predictions in the next assessment report (AR5). As input to this, the Met Office is currently generating decadal prediction experiments following the CMIP5 protocol. Additional high resolution experiments using HiGEM are being generated in collaboration with NERC.

Other current activities include:

• assessing skill in existing hindcasts from the EU ENSEMBLES project, focusing mainly on Atlantic tropical storms and extremes of temperature and precipitation assessing the predictability of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation as part of the EU THOR project;

• assessing the impact of different observations, including Argo through the EU Euro-Argo project and RAPID through the NERC VALOR projects;

• building a seamless seasonal to decadal prediction system based on HadGEM3, including investigating different assimilation approaches within the EU COMBINE project.

Career background

Since joining the Met Office in 1997 Doug has developed the Met Office Decadal Climate Prediction System DePreSys, leading the decadal prediction team since 2008. Before that, Doug worked on satellite remote sensing of sea ice and rainfall at University College London and the University of Bristol. Doug obtained a BSc in Mechanical Engineering, and a PhD in computational fluid dynamics from Imperial College London.